Beer on bridge sign of the times

July 30, 2008|By Liz Sly

BAGHDAD — Every evening at dusk, men gather on the Jadriyah Bridge spanning the Tigris River and turn it into an impromptu bar.

It's a sign of the improving times, the revival of an old habit that dates to the rule of Saddam Hussein, before the militias and extremists blew up the liquor stores and shuttered the bars as part of their effort to impose new forms of Islamic law on this once resolutely secular society.

Young men prop up the railings holding cans of beer and chat and smoke as if they were in a real bar. Old men pull up carts selling lablabi, a chick pea snack served in bars, back when there were bars. Sometimes there is dancing to the rhythmic sounds of Arabic music played on someone's car stereo, as the last of the evening's commuters whiz past and the sun sets over the green river swirling below.

And just as with real bars anywhere, the people who come here have sorrows to drown and tales to tell that come tumbling out after a few drinks have been downed -- except that these are uniquely Iraqi tales.

Among those who go to the bridge is Rafat Nadhem, 22, who has paid a heavy price for his refusal -- and inability -- to kick the drinking habit in these past years of violence.

Pulling back his shirt, Nadhem reveals the ugly scar across his neck that he says was left by Shiite Mahdi Army militiamen who slashed his throat and left him for dead after catching him with bottles in his trunk and alcohol on his breath.

"Don't you know alcohol is haram [forbidden]?" said the men who stopped him at a checkpoint in 2006 in the slum neighborhood of Sadr City, a Mahdi Army stronghold. They dragged him to a nearby field and lashed him with cables. Then, he said, one took out a knife and slit his throat.

A passerby took Nadhem to a hospital, where he made a full recovery.

But the incident haunts him. Memories of the moment intrude relentlessly on his thoughts. He stopped drinking for a year, for fear of being caught again, and a doctor prescribed him Valium to calm his nerves.

"It caused me to be constantly in fear of my life," Nadhem said. "I dare not go to any of the areas where the Mahdi Army operates -- and they are still operating, but secretly."

The restoration last year of a relative degree of calm in Baghdad also heralded a reopening of the liquor stores. Nadhem said he started drinking again, and he still takes the pills. Now he can't give up either.

"I am addicted," he acknowledges. "But the other thing is, what else is there to do for fun? We used to have clubs and discos and bars, and now there is nothing."

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lsly@tribune.com

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Foreign correspondent Liz Sly

The Chicago Tribune's Liz Sly arrived in Baghdad shortly after the U.S.-led invasion in April 2003 and has been the newspaper's chief correspondent there since May 2004. She covered the country's first and second democratic elections and the rapid deterioration in security that followed the February 2006 bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine in Samarra. She also survived a car bombing that destroyed the Tribune's Baghdad office in November 2005.

Sly first visited Baghdad in October 1990, in the prelude to the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

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